The DIARY OF JACK THE RIPPER - Softcover

Harrison, Shirley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671520997 ISBN 13: 9780671520991

Publisher: Pocket, 1995

Synopsis

A disturbing journal represents what may be the actual confessions of Jack the Ripper and includes information that supports the journal's authenticity, including ink and paper tests and clues by Maybrick himself. Reprint.

About this title

About the Author:

Shirley Harrison is the author of Jack the Ripper: The American Connection.

From Booklist:

There are signs everywhere that this is going to be a hot item. Hyperion rushed the book into print earlier than the proposed publishing date; 60 Minutes picked up the story and aired a debate on the authenticity of the diary itself; bookstores throughout the country are filling display-windows with copies of the book's handsome red-and-black cover. And then there's the evidence of the book itself. Whether or not this newly discovered diary of the Ripper is authentic--and the book makes a powerful argument that it is--the tale it tells is absolutely riveting. The suggestion is that the Ripper was actually a cotton merchant from Liverpool who, furious over his American wife's infidelity, went periodically to London to butcher whores who walked the streets close to where he had first seen his wife walking with her lover. The diary itself is either an elaborate and brilliant hoax authored early in the century (paper and ink dating have established that it is between 60 and 100 years old) or the genuine article. It is full of the sort of gruesome details that only someone with access to police records recently released could have known: for instance, that the Ripper took the heart of one of the victims home. The man himself, James Maybrick, was a drug addict who gradually became more and more unhinged throughout the authorship of his mad diary and ended up being murdered by his wife. From all angles, it is an extraordinary tale that, when accompanied by numerous arresting photographs and the text of the diary itself (in facsimile and in type), leaves one at the heart of a horrific and mesmerizing crime--one that somehow seems to define our terrible and frightening age. Stuart Whitwell

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0671520997
• ISBN 13: 9780671520991
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352